Weeknote 2024.27

Saturday

Gardening. Felt good to have everything out of plant pots and into the ground and this meant I could sort out the patio on Sunday.

Sunday

More gardening. Now ready for outdoor eating. (I believe that it's called al fresco, Lily Allen.) Washed 100s of plant pots ready for next season.

Monday

Covid negative at last. Took tests yesterday and this morning to be sure.

Good to be back in the office, caught up with colleagues, spent some time on fiddly bits of administration, and edged our proposed portfolio one step closer to agreement. And got to the local barbers just in time for a haircut.

In the evening, I joined the photographic society annual digital image competition, and I must say my heart fell when the judge said she “was not one for cropping” and “was unsure why people presented black and white images” while I am one for cropping and black and white images. My only consolation was some truly superb uncropped colour images did no better than mine.

Tuesday

Bad train day. A difficult but friendly meeting with colleagues as we move to decommission one of our legacy (or heritage) applications. For lots of reasons we have no choice but to do this, however I know its disruptive to users, and thus to the services they provide, so want to provide as much help as we can through the transition.

Wednesday

Explored how we can make some of our internal processes better than they are with colleagues, while recognising they still won’t be perfect. My belief is that it’s better to continually improve a lot of things a little bit a time rather than spend a massive amount of time making a few things perfect.

And I joined a government AI discussion. At times, these meetings seem to suck all the excitement out of the potential to use AI to deliver better public services, however it felt like we are moving towards a more balanced position. Yes, we need to follow the law, and behave ethically. And yes, we must use every tool at our disposal as demand for our services increases and resources decrease.

Thursday

A bit of an everything day, starting with meeting a potential supplier and then a regular briefing with my lead member. A few specific things to talk about as well as a general update.

Then discussions around how we identify the most important things we need to act on now. Separating important things from unimportant things is easy. Teasing a lot of important things into a priority order is much harder. I have been doing this informally with colleagues so far, however, will see if I can find my Fibonacci sequence cards, which I found accentuate the differences between quite similar things.

Friday

A relatively quiet day in the office, with just a handful of meetings, so made a bit of a dent in my to-do list, as well as drafting a cabinet report. I tend to start with the narrative and then ask my team to fold-in the details before I check everything is correct, clear and consistent.

It was great to sit amongst the team as they prepared for a big logistics event next week. The planning has been very thorough and work to mitigate the remaining risks is well underway. And as others created content for our next all staff meeting. (We call them Town Halls, which is one of those Americanisms that seems odd to me, especially in local government where we have actual Town Halls, or in our case, a Civic Centre.)

Track of the week

Dancing with Myself, it was a tough decision on which version to recommend, and finally decided on the Generation X original (with Billy Idol as lead singer) https://open.spotify.com/track/1lEhKudlkpBsh6S7JyvvHs?si=bb3c2c3850ef4ae9

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